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Is there any Hard drive size limit in XP?



 
 
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  #1  
Old March 13th 14, 03:54 AM posted to microsoft.public.windowsxp.general
No_Name
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 591
Default Is there any Hard drive size limit in XP?

Is there any Hard drive size limit in XP?

On my W98 computer, the limit is 120G. I am using an 80 and a 120 on
there. I have a 160, which would not work on W98. I'm intending to add
that as a second drive on the XP puter. Do I need any special drivers
or can I just install it? I'll partition it into several partitions
anyhow. I have 7 partitions on my W98 puter, and that is how I like it.
Each has it's own purpose, but I have the dual boot to W2K on there. I
wont need that partition on XP, so I'll have 6 of them total.

Also, with this being an old computer from around 2002, will the drive
size limit be affected by the Bios?


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  #2  
Old March 13th 14, 05:12 AM posted to microsoft.public.windowsxp.general
Paul
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 18,275
Default Is there any Hard drive size limit in XP?

wrote:
Is there any Hard drive size limit in XP?

On my W98 computer, the limit is 120G. I am using an 80 and a 120 on
there. I have a 160, which would not work on W98. I'm intending to add
that as a second drive on the XP puter. Do I need any special drivers
or can I just install it? I'll partition it into several partitions
anyhow. I have 7 partitions on my W98 puter, and that is how I like it.
Each has it's own purpose, but I have the dual boot to W2K on there. I
wont need that partition on XP, so I'll have 6 of them total.

Also, with this being an old computer from around 2002, will the drive
size limit be affected by the Bios?



There is a size limit, but it's complicated. For a modern
user of WinXP (say an SP3 installer CD) and a modern (just purchased)
computer, the limit is the limit caused by 32 bit sector numbers in
the MBR. That's 2.2TB. WinXP supports MBR and allows (easily) drives
with 2.2TB size. GPT partitioning allows larger disks and partitions,
but a later OS is needed. So that's the "today" limit, but
not the "Casey's hardware" limit. Since you have an 815E/ICH2
system, if memory serves.

If you go back in time, to the year 2003, that's around the time
that Southbridge IDE interfaces were just about all getting 48 bit LBA
support. Before that, there were some IDE interfaces that were limited
to 137GB drives. So 120GB was the largest drive that was recommended at the
time.

I can try and paint a picture, but I don't know if I'll get it right
or not. Even at the time, I didn't really understand it all that well.

Say you have WinXP Gold (original installer CD), without
support for 137GB.

1) If you start with an empty disk, and install C: , the OS will prevent
you from using areas above 137GB.

2) There could be existing partitions on the disk.

a) If an existing partition is entirely above 137GB, chances are
it is being functionally ignored by the new OS installation.
No harm will come to it, no data will be damaged.

b) An existing partition can "span" the 137GB capacity mark on the
disk. The lower part of the partition is below 137GB. The OS then
tries to use the partition (say, on the first boot after install).
The very first access to the partition, requires looking up near the
end of it, above the 137GB mark. If any writes are needed immediately
(like a Last-accessed date perhaps), it results in the partition
being corrupted. There is address rollover, the attempted write
goes to the incorrect sector, and the disk is corrupted. The more
writes, the more trashed it gets.

The end result of the previous description, is to make sure your 500GB
IDE drive, doesn't have any partitions straddling the "line".

To address the 137GB IDE era, Seagate produced this document. It tells
you what OS versions to use, what hardware cards to buy to work around
a motherboard limitation. This is the kind of document you'll need to
read *several times* , to get all the value from it. (390KB)

http://web.archive.org/web/200701210...c/tp/137gb.pdf

"For Windows XP SP1 see article Q303013:"How to Enable 48-bit
Logical Block Addressing Support for ATAPI Disk Drives in Windows XP"
at support.microsoft.com."

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/303013

That means, if your WinXP installer disc is SP2 or SP3, there
is no work to do at all. If the hardware, for some reason,
doesn't support over 137GB (really old motherboard), SP2 or SP3
could handle a 2.2TB disk if present, but they won't make a C:
that goes past 137GB if the hardware won't allow it.

If you insisted on using an SP1 installer CD, without slipstreaming
it to a higher Service Pack, then you'd have to read that (horrible)
303013 article and figure it out :-) Even installing using an SP1 disc,
then executing the SP2 .exe won't work, because the disk still has
the size exposure issue while the SP1 CD is being used.

I only know some of this, from the responses of Win2K when installing.
I did experiments with Win2K SP2 (137) and SP4 (137). And that's where
I pieced together some of the dangers about partitions. I don't have
enough WinXP materials here, to do much in the way of testing.

The 815E comes with an ICH2 I think. The IDE ports would be off that
thing. If you wanted to guarantee no hardware problems, you could
plug in an Ultra133 TX2 for example. It supports 48 bit LBA. With the
Ultra100 TX2, only certain firmware versions supported 48 bit LBA. So
that card could be flash upgraded. A modern PCI IDE add-on card will
have a 48 bit LBA BIOS chip installed, so it would work too. The examples
I just gave, of Promise IDE cards you can find on Ebay, is intended to
show that even the add-on cards straddled the magic 2003 date. One
card was a lock, the other card, you could flash it and fix it. I've
flashed Promise cards here before, as part of aligning firmware to
driver version.

As far as I can interpret from the original proposal of how
to do 48 bit LBA on IDE, this is largely a BIOS (firmware) issue. The
method should be relatively independent of the circuits in
your Southbridge. But this is my interpretation of how this works,
not something I can provide a reference to. 48 bit works by "double
pumping" registers on the disk, and the disk just listens to the
last two writes on the register, to be prepared for a 48 bit address.
It's an clever scheme, intended to have as little impact on hardware
as possible. I just wish it could have been explained a little better
at the time, to help people understand what needed to be fixed.

(Reading page one and two is enough. It shows the original 28 bit LBA
register scheme, being replaced by two-deep FIFO registers. Doc is
150KB. I've probably never read the whole thing to the end. I just
read enough, to see the double-pumping thing.)

http://www.t10.org/t13/technical/e00101r6.pdf

So then we look at the year of release of the motherboard. If
it was designed in 2003, it might be OK to use a larger drive.
If before 2003, you might need more info. The idea being, the
three large BIOS companies, had 48 bit compatible code in the
year 2003 or so.

One scummy software company, made a Windows utility to check
for 48 bit LBA support at the BIOS level. But, they charged money
for the utility, when it just should have been a freebie. (They
could have put a small executable on one of the big download sites,
to do the check, rather than trying to make a fortune from the
misfortune of others.) And I don't know if any other utilities
can do the report or not. Maybe Linux hdparm ? Not really sure.
I have one system here, where the manufacturer reported the kind
of disk support available. So I didn't need to use a utility on
that one. That motherboard, the original limit was 64GB, then a later BIOS
flash upgrade, made it to 137GB. It never supported more than that,
and I never tried torturing the thing, to see what would happen.
Some other motherboards, I can use the "2003 rule" and assume
they all have 48 bit LBA BIOS support, and can boot from a
partition shoved up near the end of a large IDE drive. That might
still leave a few computers in the 2002-2003 era, where the manufacturer
did not release a new BIOS with the necessary support, and the date
of release of the product is such, we can't rely on all the actual
BIOS makers, for the necessary proof.

Here, someone with SATA drives, drives that should not
have a size limit, seems to get a size limit from the BIOS.
The Linux tools seem to be indicating an HPA (Host Protected
Area) has been set on the drive, but it's highly unlikely
that happened "by accident". I would take this to be a BIOS
bug. Anyway, that thread has examples of some of the utilities
you can consult, to learn more about a pesky setup. Any number
of Linux LiveCDs could allow running such tools, but they're
an 800MB download (typical size today).

http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t...6-start-0.html

The HDINFO tool, is described here. This is the one where they
expected people to pay for it. I never needed to even consider
using this, because my motherboards were sufficiently supported
to understand what they did. (The 1999 motherboard was 137GB,
and the next one that I used regularly, was past year 2003
and was 137GB.) The "evaluation" utility here is 842KB, and
it's packed with something, so I can't easily view the contents.
I really wouldn't waste the time on it.

https://web.archive.org/web/20110907...nfodetails.htm

In summary, your 2002 computer is "on the edge", meaning either
a copy of HDINFO must be used to check the details, or you pop
in a VIA IDE (PCI) card and just connect the 137GB IDE drive
to that thing. Getting old computers to work, is a lot like
working at the Smithsonian, building dinosaurs out of a
pile of bones :-)

Paul
  #3  
Old March 13th 14, 05:35 AM posted to microsoft.public.windowsxp.general
Bill in Co
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 1,927
Default Is there any Hard drive size limit in XP?

Paul wrote:
wrote:
Is there any Hard drive size limit in XP?

On my W98 computer, the limit is 120G. I am using an 80 and a 120 on
there. I have a 160, which would not work on W98. I'm intending to add
that as a second drive on the XP puter. Do I need any special drivers
or can I just install it? I'll partition it into several partitions
anyhow. I have 7 partitions on my W98 puter, and that is how I like it.
Each has it's own purpose, but I have the dual boot to W2K on there. I
wont need that partition on XP, so I'll have 6 of them total.

Also, with this being an old computer from around 2002, will the drive
size limit be affected by the Bios?



There is a size limit, but it's complicated. For a modern
user of WinXP (say an SP3 installer CD) and a modern (just purchased)
computer, the limit is the limit caused by 32 bit sector numbers in
the MBR. That's 2.2TB. WinXP supports MBR and allows (easily) drives
with 2.2TB size. GPT partitioning allows larger disks and partitions,
but a later OS is needed. So that's the "today" limit, but
not the "Casey's hardware" limit. Since you have an 815E/ICH2
system, if memory serves.

If you go back in time, to the year 2003, that's around the time
that Southbridge IDE interfaces were just about all getting 48 bit LBA
support. Before that, there were some IDE interfaces that were limited
to 137GB drives. So 120GB was the largest drive that was recommended at
the
time.

I can try and paint a picture, but I don't know if I'll get it right
or not. Even at the time, I didn't really understand it all that well.

Say you have WinXP Gold (original installer CD), without
support for 137GB.

1) If you start with an empty disk, and install C: , the OS will prevent
you from using areas above 137GB.

2) There could be existing partitions on the disk.

a) If an existing partition is entirely above 137GB, chances are
it is being functionally ignored by the new OS installation.
No harm will come to it, no data will be damaged.

b) An existing partition can "span" the 137GB capacity mark on the
disk. The lower part of the partition is below 137GB. The OS then
tries to use the partition (say, on the first boot after install).
The very first access to the partition, requires looking up near the
end of it, above the 137GB mark. If any writes are needed
immediately
(like a Last-accessed date perhaps), it results in the partition
being corrupted. There is address rollover, the attempted write
goes to the incorrect sector, and the disk is corrupted. The more
writes, the more trashed it gets.

The end result of the previous description, is to make sure your 500GB
IDE drive, doesn't have any partitions straddling the "line".

To address the 137GB IDE era, Seagate produced this document. It tells
you what OS versions to use, what hardware cards to buy to work around
a motherboard limitation. This is the kind of document you'll need to
read *several times* , to get all the value from it. (390KB)

http://web.archive.org/web/200701210...c/tp/137gb.pdf

"For Windows XP SP1 see article Q303013:"How to Enable 48-bit
Logical Block Addressing Support for ATAPI Disk Drives in Windows XP"
at support.microsoft.com."

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/303013

That means, if your WinXP installer disc is SP2 or SP3, there
is no work to do at all. If the hardware, for some reason,
doesn't support over 137GB (really old motherboard), SP2 or SP3
could handle a 2.2TB disk if present, but they won't make a C:
that goes past 137GB if the hardware won't allow it.


And I might point out that's not a big deal, as 1) the disk can be
partitioned, and 2) using 137 GB just for C: to me seems a bit excessive.
:-)

To me, it's always a good idea to have a partioned hard drive, if, for
nothing else, to keep separate compartments for storing backup system images
(although preferably these would be on another drive), and/or for separating
out huge data collections, such as collections of video or music files. And
as a bonus, it's quicker to defrag and backup these separate (and thus
smaller) partitions. Whenever I get another computer, one of the first
things I do is to partition it (into at least into 2 partitions).

If you insisted on using an SP1 installer CD, without slipstreaming
it to a higher Service Pack, then you'd have to read that (horrible)
303013 article and figure it out :-) Even installing using an SP1 disc,
then executing the SP2 .exe won't work, because the disk still has
the size exposure issue while the SP1 CD is being used.

I only know some of this, from the responses of Win2K when installing.
I did experiments with Win2K SP2 (137) and SP4 (137). And that's where
I pieced together some of the dangers about partitions. I don't have
enough WinXP materials here, to do much in the way of testing.

The 815E comes with an ICH2 I think. The IDE ports would be off that
thing. If you wanted to guarantee no hardware problems, you could
plug in an Ultra133 TX2 for example. It supports 48 bit LBA. With the
Ultra100 TX2, only certain firmware versions supported 48 bit LBA. So
that card could be flash upgraded. A modern PCI IDE add-on card will
have a 48 bit LBA BIOS chip installed, so it would work too. The examples
I just gave, of Promise IDE cards you can find on Ebay, is intended to
show that even the add-on cards straddled the magic 2003 date. One
card was a lock, the other card, you could flash it and fix it. I've
flashed Promise cards here before, as part of aligning firmware to
driver version.

As far as I can interpret from the original proposal of how
to do 48 bit LBA on IDE, this is largely a BIOS (firmware) issue. The
method should be relatively independent of the circuits in
your Southbridge. But this is my interpretation of how this works,
not something I can provide a reference to. 48 bit works by "double
pumping" registers on the disk, and the disk just listens to the
last two writes on the register, to be prepared for a 48 bit address.
It's an clever scheme, intended to have as little impact on hardware
as possible. I just wish it could have been explained a little better
at the time, to help people understand what needed to be fixed.

(Reading page one and two is enough. It shows the original 28 bit LBA
register scheme, being replaced by two-deep FIFO registers. Doc is
150KB. I've probably never read the whole thing to the end. I just
read enough, to see the double-pumping thing.)

http://www.t10.org/t13/technical/e00101r6.pdf

So then we look at the year of release of the motherboard. If
it was designed in 2003, it might be OK to use a larger drive.
If before 2003, you might need more info. The idea being, the
three large BIOS companies, had 48 bit compatible code in the
year 2003 or so.

One scummy software company, made a Windows utility to check
for 48 bit LBA support at the BIOS level. But, they charged money
for the utility, when it just should have been a freebie. (They
could have put a small executable on one of the big download sites,
to do the check, rather than trying to make a fortune from the
misfortune of others.) And I don't know if any other utilities
can do the report or not. Maybe Linux hdparm ? Not really sure.
I have one system here, where the manufacturer reported the kind
of disk support available. So I didn't need to use a utility on
that one. That motherboard, the original limit was 64GB, then a later BIOS
flash upgrade, made it to 137GB. It never supported more than that,
and I never tried torturing the thing, to see what would happen.
Some other motherboards, I can use the "2003 rule" and assume
they all have 48 bit LBA BIOS support, and can boot from a
partition shoved up near the end of a large IDE drive. That might
still leave a few computers in the 2002-2003 era, where the manufacturer
did not release a new BIOS with the necessary support, and the date
of release of the product is such, we can't rely on all the actual
BIOS makers, for the necessary proof.

Here, someone with SATA drives, drives that should not
have a size limit, seems to get a size limit from the BIOS.
The Linux tools seem to be indicating an HPA (Host Protected
Area) has been set on the drive, but it's highly unlikely
that happened "by accident". I would take this to be a BIOS
bug. Anyway, that thread has examples of some of the utilities
you can consult, to learn more about a pesky setup. Any number
of Linux LiveCDs could allow running such tools, but they're
an 800MB download (typical size today).

http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t...6-start-0.html

The HDINFO tool, is described here. This is the one where they
expected people to pay for it. I never needed to even consider
using this, because my motherboards were sufficiently supported
to understand what they did. (The 1999 motherboard was 137GB,
and the next one that I used regularly, was past year 2003
and was 137GB.) The "evaluation" utility here is 842KB, and
it's packed with something, so I can't easily view the contents.
I really wouldn't waste the time on it.

https://web.archive.org/web/20110907...nfodetails.htm

In summary, your 2002 computer is "on the edge", meaning either
a copy of HDINFO must be used to check the details, or you pop
in a VIA IDE (PCI) card and just connect the 137GB IDE drive
to that thing. Getting old computers to work, is a lot like
working at the Smithsonian, building dinosaurs out of a
pile of bones :-)

Paul



  #4  
Old March 13th 14, 05:59 AM posted to microsoft.public.windowsxp.general
No_Name
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 591
Default !!!!!!!

On Thu, 13 Mar 2014 00:12:04 -0400, Paul wrote:

There is a size limit, but it's complicated. For a modern


That sure is complicated !!!!

Before i buy an add-on board, I'll just buy a used 120g HD. They're
cheap these days. I dont see the need for anything bigger. I have darn
near filled up the 160G (2 drives) on my W98 machine, but that's because
I store everything on it. I have around 5000 songs, at least 1000
videos, everything I've downloaded since the early 90's and saved, and
many years of photos. I just recently bought a 500g and a 1tb USB
external drives, and all that stuff is going to get moved to them. I
really dont see the need for more than 160g, as long as I dont store all
that stuff on it. I'll probably keep the music on the HD though,
because those USB drives cant be accessed from W98, so I'd have to keep
booting to W2K to listen to the songs. -OR- use the XP computer, which
means I need two sets of speakers, which is already getting too
cluttered with 2 systems.

I probably will make that bigger drive into 4 partitions anyhow. Having
one huge drive tends to get very fragmented. I have one 5g partition on
my W98, just for my newsreader. Because I save lots of messages, that
tends to get more fragmented than anything else on the computer. But
that tiny partition can be defragegd in 2 or 3 minutes.

Anyhow, I'll save that 160g drive for the next computer I make, which
will be a newer processor and MB.

Thanks

  #5  
Old March 13th 14, 06:02 AM posted to microsoft.public.windowsxp.general
No_Name
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 591
Default !!!!!!!

On Wed, 12 Mar 2014 23:59:29 -0500, wrote:

On Thu, 13 Mar 2014 00:12:04 -0400, Paul wrote:

There is a size limit, but it's complicated. For a modern


That sure is complicated !!!!

Before i buy an add-on board, I'll just buy a used 120g HD. They're
cheap these days. I dont see the need for anything bigger. I have darn
near filled up the 160G (2 drives) on my W98 machine, but that's because
I store everything on it. I have around 5000 songs, at least 1000
videos, everything I've downloaded since the early 90's and saved, and
many years of photos. I just recently bought a 500g and a 1tb USB
external drives, and all that stuff is going to get moved to them. I
really dont see the need for more than 160g, as long as I dont store all
that stuff on it. I'll probably keep the music on the HD though,
because those USB drives cant be accessed from W98, so I'd have to keep
booting to W2K to listen to the songs. -OR- use the XP computer, which
means I need two sets of speakers, which is already getting too
cluttered with 2 systems.

I probably will make that bigger drive into 4 partitions anyhow. Having
one huge drive tends to get very fragmented. I have one 5g partition on
my W98, just for my newsreader. Because I save lots of messages, that
tends to get more fragmented than anything else on the computer. But
that tiny partition can be defragegd in 2 or 3 minutes.

Anyhow, I'll save that 160g drive for the next computer I make, which
will be a newer processor and MB.

Thanks


Wow, somehow I screwed up the subject line on this msg....

  #6  
Old March 13th 14, 06:46 AM posted to microsoft.public.windowsxp.general
micky[_2_]
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 926
Default !!!!!!!

On Wed, 12 Mar 2014 23:59:29 -0500, wrote:

Before i buy an add-on board, I'll just buy a used 120g HD.


Of course used drives are that much closer to failure.
  #7  
Old March 13th 14, 06:57 AM posted to microsoft.public.windowsxp.general
Paul
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 18,275
Default !!!!!!!

wrote:
On Wed, 12 Mar 2014 23:59:29 -0500,
wrote:

On Thu, 13 Mar 2014 00:12:04 -0400, Paul wrote:

There is a size limit, but it's complicated. For a modern

That sure is complicated !!!!

Before i buy an add-on board, I'll just buy a used 120g HD. They're
cheap these days. I dont see the need for anything bigger. I have darn
near filled up the 160G (2 drives) on my W98 machine, but that's because
I store everything on it. I have around 5000 songs, at least 1000
videos, everything I've downloaded since the early 90's and saved, and
many years of photos. I just recently bought a 500g and a 1tb USB
external drives, and all that stuff is going to get moved to them. I
really dont see the need for more than 160g, as long as I dont store all
that stuff on it. I'll probably keep the music on the HD though,
because those USB drives cant be accessed from W98, so I'd have to keep
booting to W2K to listen to the songs. -OR- use the XP computer, which
means I need two sets of speakers, which is already getting too
cluttered with 2 systems.

I probably will make that bigger drive into 4 partitions anyhow. Having
one huge drive tends to get very fragmented. I have one 5g partition on
my W98, just for my newsreader. Because I save lots of messages, that
tends to get more fragmented than anything else on the computer. But
that tiny partition can be defragegd in 2 or 3 minutes.

Anyhow, I'll save that 160g drive for the next computer I make, which
will be a newer processor and MB.

Thanks


Wow, somehow I screwed up the subject line on this msg....


No you didn't. Your response seems perfectly reasonable :-)

I wouldn't worry about this too much.

If you're concerned about an internal (IDE) drive,
and one partition is present, keep it below 137GB.
If two partitions are present, make sure the second partition
does not span the 137GB mark. For example, if you had
0-136GB as one partition, and 138GB-160GB, that should
be pretty safe. The upper partition won't be touched,
if it is considered "out of reach".

Installing a PCI card with an IDE connector, one purchased
today, would give 48 bit LBA on the motherboard side. Installing
the OS, gives an opportunity to detect trouble (as C: won't go past
137GB, if the Service Pack is too old). Copying over a 40GB WinXP
install to a 160GB empty disk, then booting the 160GB, wouldn't
give quite the same degree of protection against issues. You could
get in there, and notice Disk Management won't allow creation of
partitions above 137GB, which would tell you something about which
OS release you used.

The external drives can extend to 2.2TB, as they aren't passing
through a motherboard-style IDE interface. And if you buy a
3TB or 4TB drive, be prepared for another long answering post :-)

Paul
  #8  
Old March 13th 14, 10:42 AM posted to microsoft.public.windowsxp.general
No_Name
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 591
Default !!!!!!!

On Thu, 13 Mar 2014 01:46:41 -0400, micky
wrote:

On Wed, 12 Mar 2014 23:59:29 -0500, wrote:

Before i buy an add-on board, I'll just buy a used 120g HD.


Of course used drives are that much closer to failure.


Yea, but you cant buy smaller new ones anymore. Right now, i'm using a
40g Seagate, which I bought on Ebay for $6 total, with shipping. I was
looking for an 80g, but there were no 80s at the time for a good price.
I couldn't pass up this deal. It's always a spare, which I sometimes
use for storage, then back it up to a USB drive, and unplug it, and
label it. This week or next week, I'll probably find an 80g or 120g for
a good price and will move the install over to that, since I now know
how. I picked up that 160g for $13 total, that was a good deal too.

I remember back in the early 1990's paying $150 for a 10 meg drive, and
it was one of those 5 1/4" boat anchors. I think they were called a MFM
drive, and those things did tend to go bad quickly. I've had few
problems with IDE drives. I have a whole box full of 1g to 10g IDE
drives, there was a local computer recycling company, but they went out
of business. I bought that whole box for something like $3. But those
are just too small for much these days, especially below 10g

Also back then, I bought some 40 MEG SCSI drives, from an industrial
supplier. Those suckers were 5 1/4 by 4 inches thick, and weighed a
ton. At that time, I had 2 of them on the same Dos/Win3.x 486 computer,
and that was a LOT of drive space for those days.

I recall back then, when the first 1G drives came out, I said "no body
needs that much drive space". Now I say the same thing for the 1tb (or
more) drives.

Times sure have changed!

For now, 200g (on two drives) suits me well, on both XP and W98.

  #9  
Old March 13th 14, 11:15 AM posted to microsoft.public.windowsxp.general
No_Name
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 591
Default !!!!!!!

On Thu, 13 Mar 2014 01:57:02 -0400, Paul wrote:

wrote:
On Wed, 12 Mar 2014 23:59:29 -0500, wrote:

On Thu, 13 Mar 2014 00:12:04 -0400, Paul wrote:

There is a size limit, but it's complicated. For a modern
That sure is complicated !!!!

Before i buy an add-on board, I'll just buy a used 120g HD. They're
cheap these days. I dont see the need for anything bigger. I have darn
near filled up the 160G (2 drives) on my W98 machine, but that's because
I store everything on it. I have around 5000 songs, at least 1000
videos, everything I've downloaded since the early 90's and saved, and
many years of photos. I just recently bought a 500g and a 1tb USB
external drives, and all that stuff is going to get moved to them. I
really dont see the need for more than 160g, as long as I dont store all
that stuff on it. I'll probably keep the music on the HD though,
because those USB drives cant be accessed from W98, so I'd have to keep
booting to W2K to listen to the songs. -OR- use the XP computer, which
means I need two sets of speakers, which is already getting too
cluttered with 2 systems.

I probably will make that bigger drive into 4 partitions anyhow. Having
one huge drive tends to get very fragmented. I have one 5g partition on
my W98, just for my newsreader. Because I save lots of messages, that
tends to get more fragmented than anything else on the computer. But
that tiny partition can be defragegd in 2 or 3 minutes.

Anyhow, I'll save that 160g drive for the next computer I make, which
will be a newer processor and MB.

Thanks


Wow, somehow I screwed up the subject line on this msg....


No you didn't. Your response seems perfectly reasonable :-)

Somehow my typing wandered off into the subject line.... Thus the
!!!!!!! subject....

I wouldn't worry about this too much.

If you're concerned about an internal (IDE) drive,
and one partition is present, keep it below 137GB.
If two partitions are present, make sure the second partition
does not span the 137GB mark. For example, if you had
0-136GB as one partition, and 138GB-160GB, that should
be pretty safe. The upper partition won't be touched,
if it is considered "out of reach".

Installing a PCI card with an IDE connector, one purchased
today, would give 48 bit LBA on the motherboard side. Installing
the OS, gives an opportunity to detect trouble (as C: won't go past
137GB, if the Service Pack is too old). Copying over a 40GB WinXP
install to a 160GB empty disk, then booting the 160GB, wouldn't
give quite the same degree of protection against issues. You could
get in there, and notice Disk Management won't allow creation of
partitions above 137GB, which would tell you something about which
OS release you used.

The external drives can extend to 2.2TB, as they aren't passing
through a motherboard-style IDE interface. And if you buy a
3TB or 4TB drive, be prepared for another long answering post :-)

Paul


So if I dont let any partition get above 137g, then I'm fine. Well,
then I'm ok. I'd probably do something like 40 - 60 - 60 (three
partitions). Plus 2 or 3 partitions on the first drive. Right now, I
have a 40g (which I intend to change to an 80 when I buy one). But I
have C: 10g D: 30g now.

I intend to build a more powerful system soon, so I dont want to stick
much money in this one, it is kind of slow, but it's always a good spare
computer. I actually have a few P4 computers. One needs a SATA drive,
those are confusing to me. The other one was in a flood. After washing
it well, and letting it dry for weeks, the MB does boot to the bios, the
fans all work, the power supply is fine, But all the drives HD / CD /
Floppy are shot. That thing has 4g of ram in it, so it must be pretty
powerful.

Anyhow, an 80g and a 160g gives me a total of 240g. That's all I need.
My Win98 puter has two drives (80 and 120). That suits me well, but
it's getting too full with all the storage I have on it. That is why I
bought those USB external drives, so I can dump off some of that surplus
and still get to it easily. The only problem is that W98 cant access
them, so I have to use my dual boot, go into W2K, and copy the stuff to
the HD. USB support is the biggest problem for W98. I'd still like to
try to install W98 on a Pentium 4 machine, but there are probably no
drivers. That would be a damn fast computer though.....

It's too bad there aren't guys who make drivers for this sort of thing.
I dont think MS has to write them, but I know little about programming.


  #10  
Old March 13th 14, 03:57 PM posted to microsoft.public.windowsxp.general
Tim Slattery[_2_]
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 223
Default Is there any Hard drive size limit in XP?

Paul wrote:

There is a size limit, but it's complicated. For a modern
user of WinXP (say an SP3 installer CD) and a modern (just purchased)
computer, the limit is the limit caused by 32 bit sector numbers in
the MBR. That's 2.2TB. WinXP supports MBR and allows (easily) drives
with 2.2TB size. GPT partitioning allows larger disks and partitions,
but a later OS is needed.


Not necessarily. I use a 3TB external disk (actually two of them) with
an XP machine. I think that the first time you use it, it installs a
driver for the GUID partition system. After that, it works fine.

--
Tim Slattery
tim at risingdove dot com
  #11  
Old March 13th 14, 08:41 PM posted to microsoft.public.windowsxp.general
Paul
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 18,275
Default Is there any Hard drive size limit in XP?

Tim Slattery wrote:
Paul wrote:

There is a size limit, but it's complicated. For a modern
user of WinXP (say an SP3 installer CD) and a modern (just purchased)
computer, the limit is the limit caused by 32 bit sector numbers in
the MBR. That's 2.2TB. WinXP supports MBR and allows (easily) drives
with 2.2TB size. GPT partitioning allows larger disks and partitions,
but a later OS is needed.


Not necessarily. I use a 3TB external disk (actually two of them) with
an XP machine. I think that the first time you use it, it installs a
driver for the GUID partition system. After that, it works fine.


I have a 3TB drive here, and mine uses the Acronis Capacity Manager driver.
As far as I know, there's no Microsoft GPT support in WinXP x32.
There is GPT support in later OSes.

It says here, GPT is available on WinXP x64 but not on x32.
I've only got x32 here. And that's why I use the Acronis driver.
I think there is also some other driver besides the Acronis one,
but don't remember the details. The Acronis one is effectively
a filter driver, that wedges in each drive stack.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GUID_Partition_Table

And the tables there show a UEFI BIOS is needed to boot
from the GPT choice.

It's the kind of thing, you have to do a homework assignment,
before you can buy a new large internal disk. So you know
what you're getting into. Buying a 2TB drive is so much easier.
And probably cheaper per GB as well.

Linux doesn't officially support partitions above 2.2TB with MBR.
But there is a way to do a loopback mount, with a 64 bit offset
parameter, that makes the upper NTFS partition on my 3TB drive
visible from Linux. It's just slow (10MB/sec), when the disk is
good for 135MB/sec.

Paul
  #12  
Old March 14th 14, 08:16 AM posted to microsoft.public.windowsxp.general
J. P. Gilliver (John)
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 5,291
Default Is there any Hard drive size limit in XP?

In message , Paul
writes:
[]
support. Before that, there were some IDE interfaces that were limited
to 137GB drives. So 120GB was the largest drive that was recommended at the
time.

[]
And a _few_ drives in the _slightly_ larger range at the time - such as
160, so yours may have it - could be jumpered to appear as (I think)
137, i. e. make the upper part invisible - to get round that, or at
least to stop that causing problems.

(Incidentally, someone said "no problem, I'll use 40 - 60 - 60" - that
would have the third partition "spanning" the 137 limit, which if I
understood Paul's explanation could trash things if you've got one of
the causes of the limit. But find out if you _have_ got that limit
before worrying - it was only some motherboards. [And IIRR for some of
those, a BIOS patch was available?])
--
J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/1985 MB++G()AL-IS-Ch++(p)Ar@T+H+Sh0!:`)DNAf

If you have finished with your data, back it up to CD-RW and it will never
bother you again. - Adrian Tuddenham of Poppy records, September 2013.
  #13  
Old March 14th 14, 09:15 AM posted to microsoft.public.windowsxp.general
Paul
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 18,275
Default Is there any Hard drive size limit in XP?

J. P. Gilliver (John) wrote:
In message , Paul writes:
[]
support. Before that, there were some IDE interfaces that were limited
to 137GB drives. So 120GB was the largest drive that was recommended
at the
time.

[]
And a _few_ drives in the _slightly_ larger range at the time - such as
160, so yours may have it - could be jumpered to appear as (I think)
137, i. e. make the upper part invisible - to get round that, or at
least to stop that causing problems.

(Incidentally, someone said "no problem, I'll use 40 - 60 - 60" - that
would have the third partition "spanning" the 137 limit, which if I
understood Paul's explanation could trash things if you've got one of
the causes of the limit. But find out if you _have_ got that limit
before worrying - it was only some motherboards. [And IIRR for some of
those, a BIOS patch was available?])


The clip jumper causes the drive to report an
alternative geometry. This is interpreted by the
BIOS as either 33GB or 2GB. I think I've tried this,
many moons ago.

Paul
 




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